The Other Side
by TwinEnigma
Summary: An accident on a convoy far in the future of Pete's World conceals a far more sinister mystery. The key to the puzzle is in the mind of the survivor. Sequel to Amarantos
1. Chapter 1

_**The Other Side**_

_By TwinEnigma_

_Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who or make profit from writing this._

_Warnings: Pete's World, futurefic, OCs, mentions of MetacrisisTenth/Rose, spoilers for season 4; you may want to read Amarantos first, as this is a sequel to it. I promise, though, that if you can get through the horrors of having to see a few, gasp, OCs and past any pairingwank, you'll get a very nice little adventure, chock full of referential goodies.  
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* * *

**01.**

"Oi, Jimmy!"

A young man raises his head from his clipboard and lowers his glasses a bit as a man with close-cropped dark hair runs up to him, dodging the officers passing through the upper Hub.

"New orders came in," the other says, grinning ear-to-ear. His face is awash with honest mischief and delight. "Got the Galactic Core run!"

"The brass must be going soft in the head, putting you out there, Sam Tyler," the first, Jimmy, says, rolling the last syllables of the name. But the corners of his lips twitch in the start of a smile and his eyes are just as mischievous.

"Oi, they're the fools who gave me a ship!" the other man, Sam, feigns annoyance. "Least I can do is oblige them, right?"

Jimmy snorts, absently shaking his head as he looks back down at his clipboard, checking off another box.

"So, got your assignment yet?" Sam asks, practically rocking on his heels.

"Me and Noble picked up the rookie run today," Jimmy says, nodding towards the window and the tarmac beyond, TARDIS after TARDIS lined up in neat rows, refueling on the old Cardiff rift.

"Sucks to be you, mate," the other man says, clapping him on the arm as he starts to move past him. "I gotta run! Convoy's leaving!"

"Watch your ass out there," he shouts after him. "Galactic Core's no place to fool around!"

"Don't worry," Sam calls over his shoulder, "Lucy's never let me down!"

Jimmy shakes his head and goes back to his checklist, turning away.

Something, somewhere in time clicks into place.

He stiffens, his eyes widening, and his fingers clench the pencil hard enough that he snaps it. Just as quickly as it had come, the sensation is gone. Slowly, he turns back, looking at the door his friend had disappeared through.

He has a bad feeling.

* * *

Sam drums out a rhythm with his fingers on the console, humming away to an old pop song as he pretends it's a drum set. In his head, his ship, Lucy, follows along with the music even as she tracks the convoy's progress. It's been a surprisingly pleasant journey so far for them with little trouble. Not that his Lucy couldn't handle any trouble that came along – she is a TARDIS, after all, and built of pretty stern stuff – but it's a pleasant change, considering Lucy and he have got this horrible habit of attracting trouble. It finds them, even when they're not looking for it, and twice as often when they are.

Lucy giggles, her telepathic field an affectionate caress on his mind.

"Agatha to Lucy," the speakers squawk with the voice of the pilot of the convoy's lead ship. "We're preparing to pass the Dead Zone, over."

Sam frowns, leaning forward and flipping switches. "Roger that, Agatha," he says, "Coming up on your starboard side now, over."

Lucy hums as she moves, her engines pulsing out the steady beat of her heart, but he can feel her shiver as they get closer to the edge of the Dead Zone. He doesn't need to tell her that he feels it, too: she feels his anxiety keenly through their link. The inky blackness beyond the warning buoys on their starboard is unsettling, a perfect sphere of nothingness, and there is a palpable aura of lingering menace that interferes with both of their senses. Something bad happened there, long, long ago and the echoes of that evil still linger, like billions on billions of screams frozen in time.

He hates this place. It's wrong in ways he can't even begin to describe.

In the back of his head, something pulls taut, like a dozen threads of time are converging, and his veins flood with ice.

Something is wrong.

"Agatha to Lucy, we sense a disturbance. Please advise, over," the speakers squawk again.

"Lucy to Agatha, we have some interference - recommending you correct course to the port side, over," Sam replies, his hands practically flying along the console as he tries to get a reading. He can feel it. There's something out there, definitely. He's not completely certain, but it's like a splinter in his mind. Between the interference from the Dead Zone and the nagging feeling in the back of his mind that something big and terrible is about to happen, it's hard to pinpoint the anomaly with his senses.

Sam closes his eyes, lowering his mental shields for Lucy, and then as one they're able to see through the interference.

It's a tear in the fabric of space and time. It sits dangerously close to one of the warning buoys. If it's left to grow, it'll consume the warning buoy and eventually impact the eerie darkness of the Dead Zone.

They can't allow that. Too many convoys, human and alien, use the Galactic Core run, and more than a few rely on those buoys to keep them from the consuming darkness of the Dead Zone.

"Lucy to Agatha, we're moving in to conduct repairs. Maintain distance, over," Sam says, Lucy echoing in ever syllable as they move towards the tear. They dare not disengage the link. The interference is too great for them to pinpoint it individually and neither of them is exactly comfortable being so close to the barrier of the Zone, so they work as fast as they can on patching it up.

Something snaps.

The edge of the Zone ripples, growing, and they have only a fraction of a second to register something is wrong before they're tugged into the darkness.

* * *

Sirens blast through the base in an angry staccato and Jimmy is on his feet in a heartbeat, his meal forgotten. As he bolts for the tarmac, he can feel it in the back of his head, a twisting and winding convergence of impossibilities leading to something he doesn't understand but it scares him so much, and he runs faster, ducking past the instructors and officers.

Time is ticking away and he's never been more aware of its importance.

He bursts through the doors, other pilots on his heels, and looks up to see a crackling, crimson ball of fire descending through the sky, straight for the rift at the heart of the base.

The blue glow of an in-progress transmat crackles into existence on the tarmac, leaving behind a familiar, screaming form, and the ball of fire rises into the air, trailing ashes and smoke.

"Sam!" Jimmy yells, running to catch his friend, dimly realizing that the burning thing must have been Lucy, Sam's TARDIS.

"It burns, it burns, it burns!" he's screaming, dark eyes wild and unfocused as he clutches his head. "It burns!"

"There you go, I've got you," Jimmy says as he eases him down. He shouts back over his shoulder, "Someone get a doctor!"

Sam stills a little, staring at him like he's a stranger, and then his face shifts, a strange unholy delight on it. Above them, there's an explosion, and then Sam is screaming and crying, clawing at his head in agony.

* * *

Centuries earlier, the Doctor wakes with a startled cry.

"What's wrong?" Rose slurs sleepily. She drapes across his back in a hug, her cheek pressed soothingly against his shoulder and arms slipping under his.

He takes several deep, shuddering breaths and closes his eyes, willing his single heart to slow to normal. "Nothing," he says at last, "Just a nightmare."

And yet, it is a long time before he can get back to sleep.

He has a very, very bad feeling.

* * *

**AN:** So, I'm very very obvious and enjoy a good casual reference or two.

The idea for this came when I was about halfway through writing Amarantos and I had it figured out by the time I wrote chapter 8 (Waiting Game). I'm sure you can guess what's going on, but the ride promises to be a bit entertaining. Pete's World is an open box of fun to be had.

As a warning, I'll say this - if you want fluffy romance or cute children running around, you'll have a hard time finding it beyond hints. Some things I'm not going to expand on in detail (like how Rose and MetaTen hooked up and resolved the identity issue). This story isn't focused on them.


	2. Chapter 2

_**The Other Side**_

_By TwinEnigma_

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**02.**

It is an ordinary day at Torchwood, in Pete's World.

The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the threat of alien invasion is low, and the coffee is amazing.

Most people would consider this a good thing, but over the years the Doctor has come to be wary of times like these. They always precede some sort of trouble – in fact, he came up with a quite solid mathematical correlation between the number of days of calm, mundane normalcy and the severity of the trouble that followed.

It has been calm for a month.

One full month of peaceful, mundane, normal life, including getting home before dark, very domestic things, and getting along with his mother-in-law.

Clearly, something is about to go horribly awry. The question is 'what?'

He frowns, spinning back and forth in his desk chair as he stares at the ceiling and contemplates the wriggling timelines in the back of his head. Unbidden, he thinks of the nightmare he'd had the night previously and pauses.

No, he thinks, it's not possible and lets his mind wander down other avenues of thought.

The Doctor sits up, picking up his sonic screwdriver, and twirls it in his fingers distractedly. Perhaps it might have something to do with that rather curious incident last month, the one where the TARDIS had found her way all the way here from the other universe – and really, though he'd known it was inevitable, he'd still mourned his other self and understood why the old girl had come to him. Yes, he supposes, it might make sense. She had to puncture a rift in space and time to get here and, as much as he supposes he should be able to trust her word that it was taken care of, he has to wonder if something wasn't missed. After all, he muses, if that Jimmy character that showed up with her was really his descendant, then trouble should logically follow in his wake.

His descendant – those words always give him pause. He and Rose had _never_ really given thought to anything beyond much of the immediate future since they were left here six years previously. They had just moved on and dealt with the here and now – which wasn't exactly easy, as he recalls, since there was literally so much to get used to all over again and a whole host of familiar strangers haunting him, like Donna, Ace and so many others, even without considering the various timelines ahead of them. Still, they managed and found something of a happy ending for each other, complete with _plenty_ of running and, more recently, a child. He'd always known that having kids with Rose would have an impact down the line, especially since neither of them existed in this universe to begin with, but having been confronted with a hint about the potential extent had been nothing short of a thoroughly awkward experience.

He's curious, though – what man in his right mind wouldn't be? And it is _very_ tempting. He's got the TARDIS now (and a second growing in a pie tin in his workshop), so he could easily just pick up the missus and they could skip off to check things out for themselves.

Gingerbread houses, he reminds himself.

Besides, it's a near mathematical constant that if they did just skip off in the TARDIS, whatever apocalypse or invasion that's been brewing all month will immediately pop up and he's got the proofs to back his calculations. These things always did seem to occur when they were trying to enjoy themselves or were out of town on holiday (and that did not even begin to cover the calculations involved in trouble waiting for them at their intended destinations – really, they were very jeopardy-friendly people, he and Rose).

Best not to tempt fate quite yet, he decides, and wonders if Rose wants to skip out for an early lunch.

* * *

Jimmy stares at the building in the distance, his hands in his pockets. He's not sure why he's here. He's not even sure he wants to be here.

Noble, his TARDIS, lets off a soothing telepathic hum. She's currently disguised as a perfectly respectable vintage telephone box – red, of course, her favorite color.

"Jimmy!" a woman calls out from somewhere to his left. She waves, hurrying up to him.

"Ann," he responds, nodding in acknowledgment. "It's been a while."

"Three years," she agrees and he can feel the strain in the words as she comes to stand beside him. "I'm glad you came."

They start to walk and he can feel Noble smugly lock herself down – of course, she was behind bringing him here, the daft motherly old thing. She worries about him.

"How is Sam?" Jimmy asks.

"The same," she admits, sadly. She's aged a fair bit, worry and stress taking its toll. "He's still in there, though – he asks about Lucy, you know, sometimes..."

She trails off, a bottomless ache projecting from her every pore, and Jimmy knows what she's not saying: Sam doesn't recognize her, his girlfriend, but he remembers to ask about his TARDIS.

It's not that surprising, really. Sam Tyler was a good pilot, but he had frequently broken the safety rules regarding the telepathic fields on his TARDIS to raise their reaction times to near superhuman levels. He'd let down all his mental shields, practically immerse himself in her consciousness, and then they'd move as one being. As a result, he and Lucy shared a very strong mental bond, such to the point where any passengers he took along for a ride complained it was impossible to tell where Sam ended and his TARDIS began. They shared the same likes, dislikes and were both similarly-tempered.

But those safety rules had been put in place for a very good reason. And when Lucy was destroyed in that accident, every pilot got a sobering reminder of _why_: Sam's mind had literally shattered as she exploded.

"Jimmy?" Ann asks hesitantly, pulling something from her pocket and unfolding it. "Have you ever seen anything like this before?"

He takes the paper from her, turning it around and examining it. It's covered in concentric circles and geometric patterns, bisecting lines and overlapping shapes. It's utterly alien to him and he thinks for a moment that he can see a mathematical, organized logic to it, but the meaning escapes him. "Where'd you get it?"

"Sam," she replies, radiating unease. "He keeps drawing things like this. The doctors can't make heads or tails of it."

Jimmy sighs, running a hand through his hair. "Can I keep this?"

She nods, sniffling a little. "Sure. He won't miss it. He's got hundreds."

"Go on home," he says, giving her a quick hug. "Get some rest."

She nods again, stiffly, and jerkily wipes at her eyes. "Stop on by sometime. Don't be a stranger."

"Sure thing," he says and they both know it's a lie because pilots are wanderers by nature and lonesome by trade. But he knows that she knows the gesture is no less appreciated.

He watches Ann leave and then starts up the path to the psychiatric hospital.

* * *

Jimmy has to leave his coat, keys, the contents of his pockets, and his sonic screwdriver behind at the visitor's desk, locked up in a cupboard until he returns. He feels more than a little vulnerable without them, but he understands the reasoning all too well and simply follows the orderly deeper into the facility. The whole place feels alien to him, unsettling on every level and he's aware of how much he doesn't belong here with each step he takes. And when he's finally in front of the right room, he hesitates at the door, suddenly afraid – he doesn't want to see one of his few friends regarding him as a stranger. Look at how it was destroying Ann! He knows there was a reason he didn't come here before.

"I'll have an eye on you the whole time," the orderly assures him. "If there's any trouble, I'll get you."

Nodding stiffly, he steels himself for the inevitable.

"Sam, you have a visitor," the orderly says, opening the door. He nods, indicating it's all right.

Jimmy enters the room slowly, cautiously observing the man sitting at the table and drawing with a red crayon. Circles in circles and geometric shapes cover the papers scattered everywhere. "Hey, Sam," he says, at long last. "It's me, Jimmy. Do you remember me?"

Sam mumbles but doesn't look up.

"Suppose not, huh?" he manages, shakily running a hand through his hair. "Saw Ann outside. She's worried about you."

"Lucy?" Sam asks, not looking up. His hand pauses over the paper.

"Lucy's dead, Sam," Jimmy explains patiently.

"I know," he says, absently. "She was very clever."

"She certainly was," Jimmy agrees.

Sam raises his head at last, examining him with a strange, burning gaze. He then breaks into a too-large smile as he gleefully exclaims, "Doctor! What a surprise!"

Jimmy stares at him, ignoring the shiver of horror that crawls down his spine.

Sam starts to stand, the strange look not leaving his eyes. "It's been a while, Doctor. I trust you remember my name."

Jimmy backs up, slowly, never breaking eye contact with his friend.

"It's..." Sam pauses, his face flickering with confusion. He then looks around in complete lack of recognition, studying the walls and ceiling, and asks in a clear Manchester accent, "Is this 2006? Am I still in the hospital? I need to get back to '73. I promised Annie. My head hurts! It's burning up... Everything's burning!"

"I'll get the nurse," Jimmy says roughly and knocks on the door to let the orderly know he's done.

As soon as he's out of the room, he stands with his back against the wall, covers his face with his hands and allows himself to sink slowly to the floor.

"I'm so sorry," the orderly says. "You can't stay there."

"Just give me a minute," Jimmy tells him, rubbing his head as he tries to gather his thoughts. Taking a steadying breath, he slowly gets back to his feet and levels his most serious glare at the orderly. "I need his file. Who do I talk to?"

The orderly gives him a quizzical look, but leads on.

* * *

AN: Now with moar casual references, including a nod to another series.

Names are so important.


	3. Chapter 3

_**The Other Side**_

_By TwinEnigma_

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**03.**

The Torchwood Archives sit in a former bank in Glasgow behind secure shielding and thick concrete. It houses all the records and flight logs for the entire organization, dating back centuries to the time it had been a terrestrially-bound operation focused on acquiring alien technology. It's always run something of a small staff and, for once, Jimmy is grateful. He's got a hunch, a terrible hunch, but he needs more evidence and the archives are his best bet for finding it.

"Jimmy! How may I help you today?" the woman at the front desk asks, smiling flirtatiously. Her name is Margot and she flirts with him every time he's come here.

"I need access to some files," he replies calmly.

She presses a button and the glass doors on the other side of the desk open up. "You know the drill. Levels Eight through Ten are off limits. I'm on call if you need something."

Jimmy thanks her and enters the archives, heading straight for the access terminals to start his search. Sam's TARDIS may have been destroyed, but the convoy ships saw whatever led up to the accident. He curses when he realizes that they've restricted the files of the convoy they were escorting and decides to try a more manual approach, descending deeper into the archives, down towards the middle levels where the hard copies of convoy ship logs are kept. He finds the right ones, but the Agatha, Marple, and Poirot are all missing entries in their flight logs for the day of the accident.

A holograph flickers into light, Margot's face smiling at him pleasantly. "Have you found what you're looking for?"

Jimmy stares at her and says, "Margot, I need access to the records of the Agatha from three years ago."

The holographic projection shows her biting her lip nervously. "That's Level Eight restricted information. I can't..."

"Margot, do you remember what they call me?" he warns her. "Don't tempt me into providing a demonstration."

She fidgets and moves to type something and the blue flash of transmat leaves a thin plastic file in front of him. "I don't know what you think you'll find. It was an accident, Jimmy. Everyone knows that."

He picks it up, flipping it open, and reads. It's not a lot, but it'll have to do. Snapping the file shut, he heads back upstairs and exits.

"Jimmy, you can't leave here with that," the real Margot is already moving to stand, but he brushes right past her without a word.

"Jimmy, stop!" she shouts after him, cursing under her breath, and he can hear her start to pick up the phone as he leaves. He knows exactly who she's calling. He doesn't have much time.

Noble's already set and waiting for him, doors open. She hums in approval as Jimmy slides into the seat and takes off the necklace he's wearing, a spade-shaped key on it. He flips up a hidden panel and puts the key in – all that's left is to turn it.

The view screen flickers on, his commanding officer on the screen. "Jimmy, what are you doing?"

"I'll explain later, sir," he replies, flicking several switches and setting his destination.

"I'm ordering you to stop, right now," his commanding officer says. "You're the last of a great legacy. I don't want to have to follow you and drag you back, but I will."

"Not if I do this," he retorts, and turns the key. "Noble, initiate emergency protocol Delta-Romeo Nine."

The expression on his commander's face is one of unadulterated shock as he looks down at his controls, frantically scrabbling. "What did you do? Jimmy, what did you do?"

"Locked down the fleet," Jimmy says, smiling as he starts the engines. "Bye!"

* * *

"Come now, Professor, you can't expect me to believe it's that simple," Doctor 'Ace' McShane says. "It's like something from that TV show."

She's not Ace, not as he had known her. This Ace is older, fifty now, and hadn't gone gallivanting around time and space. She'd been picked up by this universe's version of Torchwood for her work with explosives and shuffled around their R&D departments, until ending up in Cardiff – coincidentally completely avoiding the Cybermen takeover of the London branch. She's different than the other Ace, but in many ways, she's the same: still clever, streetwise and tough, and carrying around enough Nitro-9 to level a city block. She'd even taken to calling him 'Professor' after a character in a show that she claimed talks like him. Oh, it'd driven him mad at first on account of how weird it felt being called that again because he wasn't that man anymore, but over the years he's become used to it all over again.

He still wonders to this day if it's coincidence she's here or something more. He doesn't relish the idea of running into Fenric again.

"More things in heaven and earth," the Doctor quips, with all the airs of mock sagely wisdom. "But, yes, it's really very simple. You reverse the polarity and adjust the buffers to compensate for additional feedback along the relays. Then, set the interface to a harmonic of nine and the whole thing will come together."

"Or explode fantastically," she notes dryly. "You still have to account for the base. The Mixhatallapori might not use the same base in their memory units as we do and a misstep on the programming would be catastrophic. Reversing the polarity and adjusting the harmonics could fry the whole thing."

"Well, I'm sure you'll figure it out, Ace," the Doctor says. He's confident in her ability to puzzle it out now that he's given her a nudge in the right direction. She was always clever before and look at her now: a doctor in her own right!

"I'll run some simulations," she says, sighing, and jots down some notes on the back of a spare takeaway menu. "You know, Professor, you're something else."

"Quite right, too," he remarks smartly and munches on his chips. Rose's takeaway lunch waits next to him, all wrapped up, and he resists the urge to steal some of her chips, too. "It's how you know I haven't been replaced by a Sontaran clone. Wouldn't work anyway – I'm far too complex for all that. I'd overload their systems – bam! No more clones, just soup."

Ace laughs, shaking her head.

Something gives a light tap on his mental shields from the right and the Doctor freezes in place, immediately reaching out with his senses and taking a discreet sniff of the air.

"Oi, Professor, you okay?" Ace asks, waving her hand in front of his face.

He blinks, slipping into an easy smile, and polishes off the last chip on his plate. "It's nothing. Just distracted there a moment is all. You know me, always thinking in a million and one directions with no end –"

"Your gob's got no end either," she says, smirking.

"Oi! I resemble that remark," the Doctor protests, standing and picking up the takeaway box. "Should probably get back, though. The missus'll call out a rescue team if we're gone too long."

Ace rolls her eyes and stands, because it's true, more or less and even she knows it. In the six years he's been here, sometimes the simplest things have turned into an alien invasion or kidnapping. Like the time he'd gone to get milk and nappies two years ago, which would probably have taken less than five minutes if he hadn't gotten caught up in that harvester teleport and remembered that invoking the Shadow Proclamation would reveal his less-than-terrestrial origins. As it was, those poor bastards soon figured out that accidentally kidnapping the husband of a Tyler woman was an exceedingly bad idea.

The tap comes again when they're outside, a little more insistent this time, and he whirls in place, glaring across the street as he takes a sniff.

"What is it?" Ace asks.

"Something's come up," the Doctor says flatly as he presses the takeaway box into her hands. "Tell Rose it's about the red car. She'll know what I mean."

"Should I call for backup?" She's already reaching for her phone.

"No, no," he assures her as he starts towards the street. "It's probably nothing serious. I'll catch up."

In half a minute he's across the street and following his senses towards the river. When he finally stops in front of an out-of-place red telephone box, he realizes that he's not far from where the TARDIS first landed on his first time to Pete's World. The door to the box opens and he's staring at a younger version of his own face.

Jimmy, his descendant.

Spatial genetic multiplicity is so _creepy_ when it's your own face.

"What brings you here, Jimmy?" he asks and he can't resist what he says next. "Aren't you risking a time paradox?"

"Have you seen this before?" Jimmy holds out a piece of paper.

The Doctor takes it hurriedly, paling a little as he reads it. "Where did you get this?"

"An old friend. He was in an accident a few years back. Lost his mind," Jimmy replies, "You can keep it. He won't miss it - has a whole file full of those drawings. Funny thing was, I went to visit him and he mistook me for _you_."

The Doctor's head snaps up, his eyes locking on his descendant's face. There's no hint of deception in the steely gaze that meets his own. "That shouldn't be possible," he says, matter-of-factly, and tries to ignore the rising sense of déjà vu.

Déjà vu is _never_ a good sign when you're a Time Lord.

"It's not," Jimmy agrees. "He's been locked up for three years now. Sam doesn't even know who he is half the time. There's no way he should know - _I_ didn't even know who you were until a month ago."

The Doctor frowns, tracing the curves of the Gallifreyan on the paper with his eyes, and then looks at Jimmy. "You said he was in an accident – what kind of accident?"

"We do a few different kinds of flights," Jimmy explains. "There's Rookie run, which is just getting the new kids familiar with the feel of a TARDIS. There's the Intuition run, where we basically let the TARDIS take us where and when we need to be and then there's the Convoy run. Some of the shipping lanes are more prone to spatial and temporal anomalies than others, so one of us goes with them as a precaution. Sam was on Convoy when it happened, out by the Dead Zone. According to the other ships in the convoy, he repaired a rift and the Zone sucked his TARDIS in. Next time anyone saw them was when his TARDIS used her emergency transmat to drop him in Cardiff right before she broke up."

"What's the Dead Zone?" the Doctor asks, not liking the sound of it. He could practically hear the capitals on the words and thinks it can only mean bad things. Capital letters with things like death involved are never a good sign.

"Dead Zone's... well, no knows what it is," Jimmy admits. "It's like a hole in space, a big fat nothing. Ships disappear into it and never return, it generates interference, no telepath in the universe can stand to be near the place and it gives every time-sensitive pilot the creeps. Just feels _wrong_, in every way. Place of nightmares, really, but the Galactic Core run, one of the fastest shipping convoy lanes, runs right past its outermost borders."

Suspicion drops leaden in his gut and the Doctor frowns. "What has your friend been saying exactly, besides that he knows me?"

"You're better off checking the file," Jimmy says, handing it over. "I didn't stick around long."

The Doctor gives him a knowing look as he opens it and begins to skim the contents. "Stole the file, I take it?"

Jimmy's smile is one of familiar guilty pride, but the Doctor doesn't pay it much mind – he's too focused on the text and its horrible confirmation of his fears.

"Where is this friend of yours right now?" he demands.

* * *

AN: I really am transparent. And ACE. Gosh, that was so much fun, writing her as an older woman. Jimmy's key will be explained. I really do hope the concept of the three types of mission runs the TARDISs of Jimmy's time go on are clear.


	4. Chapter 4

_**The Other Side**_

_By TwinEnigma_

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_**04.**_  
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Rose knows something's wrong the moment the Doctor steps into the lab.

He's shaken and pale, entire body tense and his hands are shaking.

"Doctor, what's going on?" she asks, immediately standing and going to him.

He catches her by the arms and she can feel it – he's scared. "I'm going to take the TARDIS. I want you to go home, get everyone and go to a safe house."

"What?" she says, incredulous, "No, whatever it is, I'm going with you. We're a team, you and me."

The Doctor shakes his head quickly. "No, not this time, Rose. Please, just... You have to go, right now. There isn't a lot of time. I'll explain later."

She takes a deep breath and resists the urge to slap him – really, she hates it when he says that. "Then you can explain it to me in the TARDIS on the way."

The Doctor blanches and she knows exactly what he's going to say next. This is hardly the first time he's ordered her home, regardless of how capable he knows she is, and as irritating as it can be, she knows he does it because he loves her. But she'd been left behind before and, long ago, she'd promised she'd never be left behind again. Not even motherhood had stopped her and she's not about to start now. She has so much more to fight for now.

"Rose, you don't understand," the Doctor says and the way he stares into her eyes right then almost freezes her in place. He's not just scared, he's _terrified_ and it scares the hell out of her.

"What's wrong?" she asks quietly, brushing her fingers against his face. "Please, you're scaring me."

The Doctor's gaze slides away and his body follows. He runs a hand through his hair like he always does and lets out a heavy sigh. "It's a long story – complicated, really."

She doesn't interrupt. Over the years, she's learned when he needs to take his time and right now his posture is screaming that he'll only say this if she lets him just talk.

"You've heard me talk about the Time War before, how there were no survivors," he says. "I was wrong. There was another Time Lord who survived, just one – the Master, a madman."

The Doctor pauses and she can see he's searching for the words. "I'd never thought I'd actually have been as glad that you were here in this world as I was then. Do you remember Martha, the Martha Jones back in the other universe? To the Master, anyone with me is just a means to an end, just another way he can hurt me. And Martha, well, he wasn't able to get his hands on her – she had some help there and, oh, she was brave-, but her family wasn't so lucky. And after what he did to her family... I can't blame Martha for leaving after that. They needed her."

She wonders what this Master did to the family of Martha Jones in the other universe to make that brave woman she'd seen leave the Doctor's side. She wonders if she really even wants to know and tries to ignore that part of herself that's asking what would have happened if she'd been there, if it had been her family. She thinks of her baby and a sliver of real terror curls like acid in her gut.

"If I'm right and it is him, if it is the Master," he says quietly, "It's not going to be safe for you or any of our family. You have to understand, Rose, it isn't about how strong you are or any of that – you're _my_ Rose, Defender of the Earth, Defeater of the Dalek Emperor, and you're brilliant and I love you so much, but the Master is _different_. He just wants to hurt me: it's like a game to him. He made me watch as he tortured Martha's whole family for a _year_, Rose."

The baby flickers back in her mind, all chubby fingers and curling toes and laughing in her mum's arms and little Tony looking so torn between a child's curiosity and revulsion of the idea of babies. Rose can't stop the shudder that sweeps through her as her imagination paints sinister hands reaching for them because she's _seen_ torture and she'd do anything to prevent her family from meeting that fate.

"Please, Rose," he begs. "I can't... If I lose either of you..."

He'd die. Maybe not right away, but he'd give up inside and, one day, he'd just let go. She'd seen it once, six years ago, in a universe long gone, and she sees it still in the way he looks at her sometimes, like she, her family and their new old friends are the only things tying him to the world.

She leans forward, until her forehead is pressed against his slightly cooler one, and lightly cradles his face with her hands. Then, she slowly raises her head, kisses him on the forehead and pulls him into a hug. "Mum's been talking about having a holiday, just us girls, and Tony could use some practice being an uncle, yeah?"

"Yeah, I suppose so," the Doctor murmurs, holding onto her like he's afraid she'll vanish.

"It's a plan then," she says at last and pretends she hasn't conceded anything.

He pulls back, murmuring apologetically as he turns to gather some things from his desk and she quickly catches his shirt, tugging it sharply.

"Come back to me," she says. "That's an order."

He smiles a little and gives her a tiny salute. "Yes, ma'am."

* * *

The Doctor finds Jimmy waiting for him outside, flipping through tourist brochures with a casual interest. Nearby, the two TARDIS ships wait for their pilots, hidden in plain sight by the perception filters.

"The twenty-first century," Jimmy says, not looking up. "Everything changes then. You live in an exciting time."

"I try not to think about it too much," the Doctor lies. He's tried to turn his eyes away from the futures he senses in his head and limit his glimpses to the immediate future, but when it comes down to the wire, he always looks. He can no more shut off the ability than he can stop the beating of his lone heart, and the look Jimmy is giving him says that he can see right through him.

"So, are you going to tell me what's going on?" Jimmy asks, replacing the brochures.

"I'll explain when we get there," the Doctor tells him as they start for the ships. He's still reeling a little from explaining the Master to Rose, something he'd hoped he'd never have to do in this universe, and, very soon, he'll have to explain the Master to Jimmy, too. He knows that what he told Rose was far too brief and near clinical in comparison to his memories, but she didn't need to know what he saw when he was on the Valiant, just like she didn't need to know what he saw during the Time War. "Does your TARDIS have isomorphic controls?"

"Sure, comes standard," Jimmy answers, giving him a shrewd look. "And I locked down the rest of the fleet. They won't be able to move from where they are until Noble transmits the right codes."

That is certainly unexpected. "She can do that?"

"Oh yes – well, only for her daughter ships, which is pretty much the entire fleet," Jimmy admits, gently patting the red surface of Noble's current exterior. "She's got a lot of security features like that. Anyway, she can even transmat people out if she doesn't like them. She says she had one tosser that she kept kicking out for being a lech, back when my mum was piloting her."

Noble gave off an amused hum, her telepathic field washing over them in something that clearly affected the sense of a fond recollection.

The Doctor can't help but smile a little at that. "Sounds like someone I know."

"From here or there?" Jimmy asks, making a vague gesture that he supposes is meant to indicate the other universe.

"It's not important," the Doctor says, unlocking the doors of his TARDIS. "Shall we go then?"

_"Allons-y,"_ Jimmy agrees and disappears inside Noble.

The Doctor resists the urge to shiver at the sudden and unnervingly sharp echo of himself in the younger man and finally turns away from the doors, heading to the console. As he sets the TARDIS to follow the younger one, he tries not to think of what he'll find when he gets there or about the sudden fear that maybe what's going on isn't an isolated incident, but a symptom of a far larger problem rippling across time and space.

This time he is unable to suppress the shiver that races down his spine.

* * *

Jimmy sets Noble down in a concealed alley by the psychiatric hospital and then heads outside, just in time to watch the older TARDIS materialize. He jams his hands in his pockets and sighs, looking away for a moment. The situation is insane and he knows it. He shouldn't have done what he just did, much less steal the files or lock down the fleet – and, hell, he knows he's going to get flack for that one even if they do get this mess sorted. But something's clearly wrong here and it's tied to his ancestor, the Doctor.

He watches as his ancestor who looks too much like him – or, more accurately, Jimmy supposes that he looks too much like his ancestor – exits the blue police box and gets his first glimpse of Jimmy's time. There's no surprise, no shock, only a deceptively detached look of anticipation. It's a far cry from the frighteningly intense gaze the man had displayed earlier at the sight of Sam's file.

The man's a mystery to him. Jimmy can see the way the timelines all thread together on the Doctor, looping and twisting around him in a maddening density. Strangely, the only truly fixed point in his timeline is a date close to six years before the time they just left and before that there's nothing, as if the Doctor had just appeared from thin air, fully-formed. If he concentrates hard enough, Jimmy thinks there might be something more, something that slips and slides away from him in eddies of golden light and fire, and he wonders if it's connected to the universe the Doctor's TARDIS is from and the other Doctor that had been her pilot.

"Is this it?" the Doctor asks, looking around.

"We're close," Jimmy replies. "The grounds are just around the corner."

"Good, good," the Doctor says and starts towards the alley entrance.

"Wait, Doctor, you still haven't told me what's going on!" Jimmy says, hurrying to keep pace with the older man.

The Doctor hesitates, his steps faltering a little. "I won't know for sure until I get inside and get a look at him."

"But...?" Jimmy prompts, glaring at him. "You already have your suspicions about what it is. Sam Tyler is my friend – I want to know what you think's happened to him."

That stops the Doctor in place, his eyes widening comically. "Tyler? Your friend's last name is Tyler?"

"Yeah, why? Does it matter?" Jimmy asks. Tyler's not exactly an uncommon name – maybe the Doctor knows someone by that name.

The Doctor shakes his head, but a contemplative look remains on his face and his body language still expresses unease. "It's probably nothing." He pauses and asks, "How long has it been since you stole his file? Minutes? Hours? Days?"

"It won't be a problem," Jimmy says confidently and explains, "The original file's still in there. I made a copy and smuggled that out. Never noticed a thing. The files from the Archives, on the other hand... those I stole. And my commanding officer knows, so we should hurry. It won't take them long to figure out what my last stop was before Glasgow and send a retrieval team."

"Point taken," the Doctor murmurs and walks a little faster, putting on a pair of glasses and pulling out a thin leather wallet. "Psychic paper. I'm going to walk right in the front door."

"I'm going with you," Jimmy says, keeping pace with him as they turn the corner. He notes the man moves with all the speed of a thunderstorm.

"What's the security like?" the Doctor asks.

"Nothing a sonic screwdriver can't handle. If you can sneak one in, you should be fine," Jimmy replies. Then, he adds, "One more thing, though: this isn't an ordinary nuthouse. Many of the patients are former pilots. If you sneak one in, you have to keep your hands on it."

The Doctor's lips thin a little as he looks at the building in the distance. "Is it common for pilots to go mad?"

Jimmy doesn't answer him.

* * *

**AN:** This was a beast of a chapter to write. I had to figure out how to write Rose staying behind believably, which was a pain because she really didn't want to, something I hope I pulled through on in that section. Another thing which is interesting is writing MetaTenth as frightened - he's got only one life now, he can't regenerate, he's got a relatively new family, and now he's got to go up against the Master, who was dangerous enough before. That, I also hoped came through.

Jimmy assumes the Doctor is from Pete's World and has simply had an encounter or adventure with his other-universe counterpart. He'll figure it out, don't worry.

There's a bit of forshadowing this chapter.


End file.
